Artists who moved from experimental realms towards the mainstream

Inspired by this thread

Simple Minds are what I always think of - the distance from Reel To Real Cacophony to "Don't You Forget About Me" is unbelievable.

Penderecki.

scritti politti

Einstürzende Neubauten, arguably. Not that their most recent stuff is mainstream in the normal sense but it is compared to their earlier records

Jim O'Rourke
David Grubbs
Sonic Youth

Genesis

Animal Collective

Human League

http://www.self-titledmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/1123787998_16af8d3f24.jpg

spk (and especially graeme revell with his hollywood soundtracks)

Franco Battiato

He started off in the mainstream in the 60s?

Chumbawamba

Cornelius Cardew

Ennio Morricone
Sally Timms
Richard Youngs

Richard Youngs

his every successive release leaps all over the place with regards to genre and approach. no way has he moved in any particular direction.

Severed Heads, Cabaret Voltaire.

anagram, plenty of other ppl listed on this thread have moved between different 'genres and approaches' - o'rourke continues to makes 'experimental' and 'pop' albs, just to name one example, so i dunno why you're being so fucken picky abt r youngs (and there's still a big diff between 'Advent' and 'Ultrahits').

Weezer for betraying their punk roots

only because I know Youngs' work but not O'Rourke's, or a lot of the other people named here.

besides, the thread (like the other one) is about ppl who are basically moving in one direction, which I don't think Youngs is. you get the feeling he could make another advent any time.

xp

I'd make the same point about Sonic Youth - they've had periods of bzzzrtKLANG followed by periods of mainstream pandering followed by more DNNNNzpppWOM followed by...

you couldn't call the first few REM albums experimental exactly (although sometimes they sound that way to me) but REM still exemplify this drift towards the centre for me

respectfully disagree on REM - in the context of what their peers were doing REM were always centerists

best example I can think of on this is jazz guy Bob James who went from ESP-disk experimental in the 60s to slick (and oft-sampled) fusion in the 70s

^^^^
Two Jazz Stanleys - Cowell and Turrentine.

Also Miles? in and out and then back in......

Caetano Veloso
Vangelis/Demis Roussos

respectfully disagree on REM - in the context of what their peers were doing REM were always centerists

respectfully disagreeing back at you – obv it's all relative but Murmur and Reckoning still sound deliciously strange and unsettling to me

Completely bloody obvious, but Pink Floyd.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ how could we all forget :(

velvet underground, kind of

George Rochberg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nA5_KRt5m0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xf9_JYLQvA

Movement in this direction is probably fairly common in visual art and film. Even with my limited knowledge of the former, Warhol and Dali immediately come to mind; in film, there must be numerous directors who qualify. (Lynch, relatively speaking, but I'm sure there are much better examples.)

Does going from "In The Air Tonight" to "Sussudio" count?

Sufjan
Ted Leo

Marianne Nowottney, sort of. Her "sell-out" album is still weird as hell, but she was obviously trying to go mainstream. I think.

smog, silver jews. going from cacaphony to euphony may not be quite the same thing though.

Cocteau Twins!

metalica of course

Arthur Russell

Steve Miller.

From Sailor to Fly like an Eagle is a distance....

http://sleevage.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/andrew_wk_cover_500.jpg

fuck yes, dude does not want to be

is that Andrew WK?

Yes. He was an experimental noise guy before deciding to make an ironic pop album.

yeah, i know he was in Wolf Eyes, i just didn't recognize that picture

Was never in Wolf Eyes.

Split Enz

most of the artists i listen(ed) to fits to this thread description.

You make it sound like this is some sort of default career path, which I don't think is true at all. certainly no more so than the other way around.

it's not a default, it's just lots of the bands i like.
more accurate to say: went from moderate experimental towards the mainstream - though not necessary arriving there fully.

ok

care to name an example or two?

Not as jarring a jump as Rochberg, but — Paul Hindemith

Stravinsky also (from The Rite of Spring and Les Noces to Symphony in C and Four Norwegian Moods (his later stuff returns to less-accessible territory though).

Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, Deerhoof...

xxpost

Liz Phair

Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev

ween

OMD.

Completely bloody obvious, but Pink Floyd.

Isn't Pink Floyd almost the other way round? They started in the mainstream, Arnold Layne and See Emily Play were poppy and chart hits.

Brian Eno

Isn't Pink Floyd almost the other way round? They started in the mainstream, Arnold Layne and See Emily Play were poppy and chart hits.

― Zelda Zonk, Tuesday, 24 August 2010 02:47 (16 minutes ago)

they were of the same spirit as interstellar overdrive, if more widely palatable

OMD.

Dang, I was coming here to post that

i think the mnstrm > experimental trajectory tends to be more succesful than hesitant entryism

Can

neu! too kinda

Liz Phair

someone put her in the other thread as well lolz

Can - wrong.

monster movie is way less experimental than tago mago, for example

Oh yeah, there were lots of records like "Monster Movie" in 1969, duh

Anyway, regards "Tago Mago", Hildegard Schmidt persuaded the band (and presumably the record company) to make it a double album and include the more 'experimental' material the band had always recorded but had rarely released till then

Thompson Twins. "A Product Of" is quite weird indeed.

Yeah, the twins and SMinds kinda own this thread.

Yoko Ono

Can - wrong

Nah you're wrong

I've heard Was (Not Was) described this way but I have no idea if it's true.

I think REM fits, even if you think the early albums are centrist relative to their scene peers. Yeah, okay, Murmur isn't Gyrate, but with basically each passing record through Automatic you hear them becoming more and more radio-friendly, often with excellent results. Depends how "experimental" they have to start out as, I guess.

There's a whole host of people who slip in by having one first record be some weird loud dissonant thing, which they then totally abandon. Adam Ant comes to mind but basically everybody where you go "Oh, but have you ever heard their first album? It's crazy!" I think the REM model is kind of more interesting, like they aren't really just ditching their whole sound, just gradually progressing in some direction that turns out to yield bigger sales etc.

Philip Glasss

Glass, even.

And Steve Reich too

Seems to me that this drift from leftfield to centre has if not stopped, at least slowed over the past 30 years. The idea of consciously trying to seize the centre ground (Human League/Scritti etc) looks like a thing of the past. the dulling and rubbing off of any spiky edges (AnCo/Mercury Rev/insert name here)appears more inevitable and less interesting.

Genesis

In which case you could probably add largely any 70s prog act. Apart from King Crimson, whose debut album was probably the most accessible thing they ever did.

Amon Duul II

Andrew WK's "ironic pop album"? Wonder which one that was

Kraftwerk

The first Kraftwerk record was a Top 40 record in Germany (in fact the first *two* S/T records), so this is a weird back-construction which renders the concept of "pop" or "mainstream" as an opposition to "experimental" as meaningless as it truly is.

This is just such a stupid and wrong-headed way of looking at music. Again and again, artists from all over the map have *moved* the mainstream or what is considered "pop" towards the area where they are operating. "Mainstream" or "Pop" is not a rigid, formal, monolithic object and it makes me really frustrated when I see people on ILM of all places talking this way.

what a difference five years of poptimism makes

"Mainstream" or "Pop" is not a rigid, formal, monolithic object

How about "corporate entertainment," then? Is that a better description of both "Everybody Hurts" and Adele?

It's these kinds of foolish retroactive ~value-judgement~ descriptors that make these approaches so elitist and also just unhelpful.

The kinds of things that people are reaching for with descriptors more like "abstract" vs "accessible" in judging in either result (perhaps possible to assess) or intent (foolish - who are you to judge what an artist's intent was?). Even this idea of accessible as descriptor implies that there are thing which are "difficult to access" or "easy to access" but what one finds accessible is hugely dependent on what your prior experience and exposure is.

Five years, ten years, fifteen years. Ugh. I'm so tired of this approach that there seem to be kinds of music that people ~valourise~ themselves or others for listening to and jeez just destroy it with fire.

how are 'experimental' or 'pop' as descriptors value judgements? who's valorising these? why is making a distinction between the music you hear on mainstream radio and the music you read about in wire magazine an inherently bad thing?

Ralf Hütter: ALL MUSIC IS EXPERIMENTAL.

http://endlesskraftwerk.tumblr.com/post/37996795698/a-very-warm-interview-with-kraftwerk-1977

why is making a distinction between the music you hear on mainstream radio and the music you read about in wire magazine an inherently bad thing?

Because these distinctions are almost *never* about ~what the music actually sounds like~ and usually far more about ~who is supposed to listen to it~. Fuck those distinctions.

glad this silly dichotomy is being dragged in both threads, as branwell says it makes v little sense applied strictly musically. maybe within an artist's discography you can say eg blackout is more experimental than ...baby one more time for b spears, or have you in my wilderness is more pop than ekstasis for j holter, but it's not like either are operating anywhere near each other at any point

only helpful way of thinking about is potentially looking at it structurally or following the money. for example, the julia holter advertising budget that's obviously increased a hundredfold. is fka twigs "mainstream" now the daily mail covers her every outfit even though her music got less pop this year? etc

It isn't the trendy pop cultural relativism that I reject here (and elsewhere) so much as the self righteous, scold-y way you are expressing it. OK, so Katy Perry (or, can I assume, Rob Thomas and John Mayer?) has as much merit as Fugazi, and this current, seemingly unanimous re-branding of vacuous pop music as "art" has nothing whatsoever to do with money. Fine, sure. But like, this is really the hill you wanna die on?

Probably not worth arguing with people who talk about "merit", true

Aaawww, you're ~so cute~ when you're trying to tone police me! *pats jimmywine on the head*

Kraftwerk 1 was a massive, Top 40 hit in Germany. Ruckzuck was played on mainstream radio all over Germany in 1971, and K1 era Kraftwerk appeared on Beat Club, the contemporary equivalent of Top Of The Pops.

I do not know what criteria anyone is judging that era of Kraftwerk by, that does not make this "pop" or "mainstream" or "played on mainstream radio".

Kraftwerk thought of themselves as experimental when they were making Ruckzuck, they thought of themselves as experimental when they were making The Man Machine.

They were experimental, *and* they were mainstream pop. This is a totally false dichotomy. And yes, this is the hill that I will die on every single goddamn time because this false dichotomy relies on the privileging of certain identities over other identities. It's bullshit, no matter what ~tone~ I take to say it. Why don't you just say I sound so ~bitchy~ when I'm right, and be done with it.

is fka twigs "mainstream" now the daily mail covers her every outfit even though her music got less pop this year? etc

Don't know the details but if you put it that way this person is bringing different ideas (by the way she dresses) to a demographic that wouldn't perhaps be aware of it. Its crossing certain boundaries.

There are so many more *interesting* ways that one can talk about the musical changes between K1 era Kraftwerk vs The Man Machine or Ekstasis vs Have You In My Wilderness.

You could talk about the sound and production being raw vs being polished. You could talk about spontaneous or improvised music vs mannered and formal music. These are valid differences of approach!

But judging music by its demographic rather than its sound is just gross and unhelpful no matter how you dress it up.

The dichotomy isnt pop/experimental, its public/private. The former are horrible sounds used against you in Asda and the street, and most of all in the workplace by the colleague with the spotify playlist and the JBL flip. The latter are horrible sounds that are hidden in shallow water but just as dangerous, as anybody might pick them up and put them in an advert or drive past your treehouse playing them from a car

When an artist moves from one to the other comes down to when sadistic monsters and capitalists and colleagues decided to strike at the heart of a serene moment, and this can happen anywhere and at anytime. It is the store manager at Asda who chooses which sound will become public and thats why I get my shopping delivered

new favourite post

xxp - but who exactly in this conversation is saying that music ought to be judged by its demographic? i'm not reading (or reading into) that anywhere?

Commercial media formats, radio chart regulations, marketing platforms, listener tastes and overall accessibility collude into making a distinction between mainstream and non-mainstream sounds.

If snobbery and tribalism arise out of this (and of course they do), that's an unfortunate side-effect of the former. But it would be a bit of a stretch to suggest that someone like Mark Fell (who is quoted as preferring the descriptor 'unusual music' rather than 'experimental music') could have mass appeal making the music he does now.

Of course there are exceptions and grey areas all through pop history - 'O Superman' is another good one - where a track has become extremely popular despite diverging quite significantly from what would be considered a comparative standard at the time.

What I mean is that there's an audible difference between, say, 'Supper's Ready' and 'I Can't Dance', one that most would describe in terms of experimental and mainstream. It's not assuming anything about the audience that listens to it, or even whether they sell many records (I'm sure early Genesis sold very well compared to later Genesis).

You bring up "stuff you read about in Wire Magazine" and then you honestly think that "Wire Magazine Readers" is not a demographic?

of course i think it's a demographic.

glad a thread about music can be a safe space for an argument where people yell at each other, it's exactly what I look for when I want to discuss how music sounds: the same fist-shaking I can get any other goddamn place on the internet

If you think that I am yelling, how about your adjust your perceptions of what *you* think my tone is?

Like, how about reading my posts aloud in comedy voices? Or basically, any voice that isn't, y'know... your Mum or whoever it is that you hear when you hear me shouting, when I am just passionately talking about my favourite band?

imagine an internet without words

It's easy if you try.

to contribute more positively: in my own experience, the longer I play, the more I'm drawn to, inspired by, and challenged by more traditional forms - like, I think a fair bit of experimenting is done by players who don't wholly know what they're doing. which is great and fine, no aspersions cast, so much of the best work imo is done by writers/musicians/etc who, not knowing what they're doing, go someplace interesting in the process of finding out.

but over the course of time, you might learn, for example, that the country & western music you'd thought of as conservative and dull, words that sometimes trade in with "mainstream" for many, is/was actually being played by some of the most capable, creative, concise players on the planet; you might hear their playing as economical where before it'd seemed just space-filling. you learn to hear stuff that doesn't stick out, to listen for how smaller parts are making a whole: your ears start responding to stuff you might have rejected or just not noticed at all earlier. that's been true for me, anyway. making music for a long time, playing with a lot of musicians over the years, has reshaped the way I hear music: I hear more than I used to, in almost any given track, really.

in this sense I do think people are right to say the distinction between experimental and mainstream is illusory, because it's a question of what you're listening for, where your attention is. but of course it's correct to say that there's music that appeals to more people and music that appeals to fewer people, that distinction's pretty easy to make.

Branwell it's not just you c'mon if I meant "Branwell stop yelling" I would say it, we've been posting on the same board for God knows how long I wouldn't subtweet you.

Why don't you just say I sound so ~bitchy~ when I'm right, and be done with it.

― Toot Your Hütter On Pollution Now! (Branwell with an N), Tuesday, December 15, 2015 7:26 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Pretty presumptuous. I don't use the word "bitchy." I do use the words "siege mentality" and "persecution complex," though.

This was a nice thread once

before i had to see your ugly-ass user name all over it

*doffs fedora*

Again and again, artists from all over the map have *moved* the mainstream or what is considered "pop" towards the area where they are operating. "Mainstream" or "Pop" is not a rigid, formal, monolithic object

this is what I was thinking about when I posted on the other thread. I've spent over a decade marketing (more or less) avant-garde unusual music, and there's an ongoing argument about what "normal" people would like, and how best to appeal to them, and is the music that we are trying to get them to listen to / see performed totally alien, or are there connections to be made between this music and what they are familiar with.

Sarah no suck-up but I always enjoy reading your thoughts and those of some of the other practioners on ILX about the use-value of "avant" cos those are the only opinions that seem to bring anything to an overused false dichotomy

What if the artist themselves have said that this was their intention? Like, for example, Herbie Hancock has explicitly mentioned that he got tired of making no money when he was doing experimental cosmic free jazz with the Mwandishi band, so he wanted to try the funk sound, because it was popular at the time... And the result was Head Hunters, which (for some time) became the bestselling jazz album of all time, so he definitely succeeded in his populism.

I'd be curious to know whether he set out to make a "mainstream" sounding record or whether he set out to make a "funk" record.

Making a record with a specific sound and set of signifiers is an aesthetic choice. Making a record with a fashionable sound is an aesthetic (or financial) choice, whether that is "funk" in the 70s or "EDM" in the 00s. But "mainstream" is not an aesthetic.

one could argue that "mainstream" means the aesthetic of fashionable sounds

branwell you weren't arguing that it's meaningless to use pop and experimental as descriptors, just that they shouldn't be held up as mutually exclusive, right? just want to make sure i'm understanding you.

I'd be curious to know whether he set out to make a "mainstream" sounding record or whether he set out to make a "funk" record.

I think he's specifically said that he noticed how the funk music of the time appealed to a broad range of people, and he felt his current band was too esoteric and difficult, so changed to jazz-funk because he felt there's no shame in trying to please the audience and make them dance.

Going "mainstream" is a different thing in relationship to jazz orthodoxy anyway

what's funny is that miles had the same train of thought and ended up with "on the corner", one of the most out-there of all time!

here's a relevant herbie quote about head hunters:

"I began to feel that I had been spending so much time exploring the upper atmosphere of music and the more ethereal kind of far-out spacey stuff. Now there was this need to take some more of the earth and to feel a little more tethered; a connection to the earth....I was beginning to feel that we (the sextet) were playing this heavy kind of music, and I was tired of everything being heavy. I wanted to play something lighter."

Yeah, and apparently he was pissed off that his former underling became successful with the funk sound and he didn't, to the point where his band was actually playing warm-up for Herbie's band... It seems he really though On the Corner would appeal to the masses!

(xpost)

Ayler had similar "delusions" about New Grass and Music is the Healing Force, etc.

yeah i do wonder if you're conflating miles and herbie a bit ... miles specifically said about "on the corner" that he was attempting to connect with a young, broad "pop" audience, but i haven't found any herbie quotes that say exactly that ... though the sentiment certainly seems correct

one could argue that "mainstream" means the aesthetic of fashionable sounds

product-wise, it does. But, as above, that might end up with One the Corner.

process-wise, going "mainstream" probably means deciding that you want to share yourself with people (as opposed to actively forging your own niche as an artist), and getting down to making music that touches on universal (and most likely uplifting/inspiring/otherwise positive) themes. If you do this, it almost doesn't matter what pallet of sounds you use, because the music/message itself is going to have a lot more in common with "mainstream" values

Experimental, as far as I can see, is a *technique* (though I know a lot of people use it as just to describe a set of signifiers, which I think is 1) really lazy and 2) leads to bad music! And if you mean the specific signifiers, say e.g. Noise, Drone, Music Concrete, and so on.)

Mainstream is, to me, a measure of how closely something has caught, or imitated, or maybe even defined/redefined that constrained space that is "records on the chart" (or what other definition of popularity you choose.) So in some cases it means "imitating the fashionable" and in other cases it means "setting a new fashion" which are two quite different choice paths.

So they are not mutually exclusive; therefore a false dichotomy. One's a technique, the other is a retroactive descriptor. Apples and oranges!

And "mainstream" means too many different things to be useful - if it's the aesthetic of "following fashion" - well fashion is always changing. If it's the aesthetic of setting fashions, wow please tell us all how that works because that would be a marvellous secret.

In Herbie's autobiography he writes extensively of the change between Mwandishi and Headhunters, he says that even though he enjoyed Sly Stone and other funk bands of the era, at first his own jazz snobbery made him dismiss the idea that he could do funk music himself, and he had to bury that snobbery and accept that connecting with the masses was nothing to be ashamed of. He specifically mentions a show where the Mwandishi shared a bill with the Pointer Sisters, and how he noticed how they were able to move the crowd compared to his own band:

"This gig put one thing into clear perspective for me: The audience at a Pointer Sisters show could let loose and have some fun, but the audience at an Mwandishi gig had to do some work."

Apparently this gig was the turning point that ultimately caused him disband the Mwandishi band and form the Headhunters.

very interesting! never heard that anecdote.

Experimental, as far as I can see, is a *technique* (though I know a lot of people use it as just to describe a set of signifiers, which I think is 1) really lazy and 2) leads to bad music! And if you mean the specific signifiers, say e.g. Noise, Drone, Music Concrete, and so on.)

Yeah, it's a term I try to avoid as a descriptor except when applying for grants, and then I have to describe it further. Plenty of musicians whose work gets described as "experimental" don't like the term because they'll argue, "it's not an experiment, I know what I'm doing."

There's are several pages more on the change in his music and attitude, but yeah, he definitely wanted to connect with broader "pop" audience. By the end of the decade he was doing straight disco albums, which were much more populist than even "Head Hunters", as that album still has only for tunes with lengthy jazz solos.

(xxpost)

interesting for me to think about the relation between fun and work ... like personally i have been trying to grapple with grimes' new album for a couple of days now ... i keep seeing it framed as a move toward pop or mainstream sounds, and i hear that too, but as s listener who is pretty out of touch with pop music it's certainly more "difficult" listening for me than her earlier works

the pointers showed him the way eh?

I think that thing with "more or less work" on the part of the listener is what we mean by that other too frequently abused term: "accessible". But this is something a lot easier to describe the qualities of: a tempo suitable for dancing, a melody which is catchy/easy to remember, a rhythm where you don't have to concentrate to find the downbeat.

But "more accessible" / less work for listeners is not a guarantee that something will be popular (though I suspect this is the kind of thing people mean when they say "pop").

And the opposite of that isn't "experimental"; it's "abstract".

abstract has too many connotations re: visual art for me to use that term vis a vis the kind of music we are talking about.

But this is something a lot easier to describe the qualities of: a tempo suitable for dancing, a melody which is catchy/easy to remember, a rhythm where you don't have to concentrate to find the downbeat.

But "more accessible" / less work for listeners is not a guarantee that something will be popular (though I suspect this is the kind of thing people mean when they say "pop").

exactly!

i've talked to and interviewed a lot of singers and songwriters who were aiming for the mainstream market, signed to major labels who expected them to sell records, and when i've asked them about their craft they've couched their aims in the universality dominique mentions - wanting to share themselves with people rather than just making art personal to them. so a lot of the time this will involve working with songwriters and producers with a track record in the current market; for songwriters, tweaking songs that might have been inspired by something personal to strike a balance between keeping the heart and details of the song, and making it relatable to anyone; and, obviously, constructing a song with radio in mind wrt catchy melodies etc. not all of these went on to be especially popular.

what it doesn't have much to do with is specific sonic palette - eg right now the sounds of choice for such artists are precisely the sounds that, 5-10 years ago, would have definitely not been chosen.

Plenty of musicians whose work gets described as "experimental" don't like the term because they'll argue, "it's not an experiment, I know what I'm doing."

Yes but isn't that taking the term too literally? If the musician has got a technique together -- a way of putting music together -- that is pretty novel, they may know what they are doing and how to deploy it. That doesn't stop it being the result of a series of experiments on themselves and the type of music they are working on - its deployment leads to different results, even if the technique used is 'the same'.

yes but you can say about pop music!

Mostly agree, wasn't saying you couldn't - just isolating and thinking about those musician args.

finding the best catch-all descriptor is a real challenge! often I just settle for "weird"

Its interesting how the thread went to a couple of jazz players -- obv thinking about popular and experimental is quite different from jazz musicians like Miles and Herbie who are thinking about how to appeal to more people as their music doesn't automatically code as pop, and certainly isn't selling in pop numbers.

Ayler and Sun Ra, too. The latter didn't even have any hang-ups and yet his disco album is just a curio in his discography. The Herbie anecodote makes him sound cynical/applying fairly cynical principles -- until you listen to the records as he pulls it off. xp = lol yeah I don't partic like "weird", so yes a challenge.

So following on from that you could say pop is an experiment and a set of techniques that large enough numbers of people have chosen to buy into. Experimental is another set of tech that most have chosen to avoid. Or aren't able to engage, for a number of other reasons.

x person/artist make his niche (whether that sells millions or next to nothing), then for a variety of reasons decide to change the techniques they use.

but again, "experimental" so strongly refers to process, and the differentiation would be about product.

idk, "pop" does code as a set of processes that change over time. Jazz was pop in the 40s, hip-hop takes the place of pop now.

i think we are defining "process" differently.

Yeah, that is not "process" that is fashion - and fashion is fundamentally stochastic (unless you are Simon Reynolds and actually bought that weird myth of "progression" within culture that was imported from the Sciences and crudely jammed into culture, which is cyclical). What changes over time are the signifiers of "fashionable". Are wide ties or skinny ties "in" right now. Fortunately no one ever tries to argue that skinny ties are more "advanced" than wide ties, they are just popular at different moments in the fashion cycle.

I think I actually really like "abstract" as a descriptor (not as a genre, but as a descriptor) than "experimental" *because* of the parallels with the visual arts.

Also because "abstract" has far less of a value-judgement attached than something like "weird" (the value judgement of "weird" depends on who you are; but also what is considered "weird" depends on who you are and the context of what is expected. I have told this story a hundred times, in the glory days of Poptimism, I remember sitting in a basement with the "weird" crowd listening to amplified mains hum for an hour, thinking "this isn't actually that weird a sound. And after an hour, it's actually kinda boring" then going into from there to a brightly lit shop where they were playing Missy Elliott and thinking "WTF, this *sounds* 1000x more *weird* than anything going on in that avante-basement!")

And I do think that abstraction is much closer to the technique - when someone plays me avant-jazz and tells me "Oh, he's playing ~around~ the melody, you've got to listen for the notes he ~doesn't~ play!" - that is exactly the process of abstraction in a visual design that has been heavily abstracted so what you are looking at is the things that have not been depicted. Removing expected elements, adding them, distorting them, altering them, streamlining them, deliberately breaking them - you can do this to the expected visual elements of a painting, or you can do them to the expected musical elements of a piece of music - taking abstracting approaches to melody, beat, rhythm, texture, tone, etc.

Also, for me it's distance from the art world - that "abstract" versus "representational" to me is just wholly a design choice. Different approaches, different meanings, different associations and semiotics, which hopefully trigger different reactions in a viewer. I have not spent 30 years of my life being told that "Abstract" was nobler, bolder, better and more true while "Representational" was bad, low class, "for girls" and contaminated with commercial concerns. (I'm SURE it happens. I just haven't had to listen to it.) They are, to me, just approaches to mix and match, impulses to balance. While this talk of the apples and oranges false dichotomy of "experimental" versus "mainstream" comes with so much baggage that I can't ignore.

Yes, happy to accept I have a diff defn of "process". "Pop" has its own set of a weirdness and abstractions too, both fields of endeavour have a lot more back-and-forth...its all v fluid to me.

Similarly fashions are underplayed in experimental contexts as much as they are overplayed in a popular context. Herbie could be said to be following the crowd and fashion of the day, as Sun Ra and Miles did (his hip-hop alb)

Ultimately, an hour of amplified hum followed by Missy Elliott is an ideal radio station.

I think I like "Unusual" music . It's not perfect but people know what is meant by that.

You might as well be saying "non-canonical".

Your "usual" might be a mix of Stone Roses and Primal Scream, with a swagger of Oasis, for example.

Right. It's not watertight. Are Talking Heads 'unusual'? To some people. To others they are very usual.

In Asda a genial sound or feeling is unusual, whereas here in the glen its almost de rigueur

branwell's last post is great, had never thought of abstract vis-a-vis painting technique like that!

"usual" and "unusual" surely only ever work in context? what does "unusual" mean in a vacuum?

I want an opposite of the 'flag post' function. 'Flag post because it is AWESOME' or something. Specifically for BraNMwell's last one.

This is something I've been absentmindedly thinking about lately but in clumsy, half-hearted terms because job & life are so busy at the moment that proper theoretical thought re: music (or anything that's not work) is tricky; this thread is pretty much what I would like to engage with properly if I had time.

I guess music (and music discussion) doesn't exist in a vacuum. do we need a single word to describe experimental/avant-garde/abstract/unusual music. is it semantically important, or can we tailor it to the situation. if I made weird bloopy noises on a bunch of soldered equipment, I'd happily describe it as 'unusual music' to a colleague for example. 'abstract' works in some cases, but is black metal necessarily abstract? is prog abstract? would I be comfortable calling my music 'avant garde' if all I was doing was putting a twist on well-ploughed punk rock furrows?

Terminological differences are tricky, because some people see word choices as incidental, almost inconsequential, and others see them as urgent and key. Generally those who see them as inconsequential aren't suffering directly from their misuse though! I couched my vague thinkings in terms of 'experimental' and 'mainstream/pop' because they were the first things that came to mind.

Surely you can call it whatever you like? I prefer unpleasant

What are your top 10 unpleasant records of 2015?

Oh no, you wont get me with that again! One year of that is definitely enough

<3 u saer

Can't say I really like "abstract" or "unusual" either -- for the former it was coined to describe painting techniques that are derived from the 50s, kinda old hat now. And then the way Greenberg theorised around abstract was annoying when I first came across it (also how he deployed "kitsch" for a lot of things that were outside of it (iirc, been a long time))

feel like Bowie wins this with his arc from Berlin era experimental-ism almost straight into radio ready 80s pop

Heaven knows he didn't have any hits in the early 70s with Space Oddity, or what was that weird inaccessible album with no hits at all, oh Ziggy Star-something and maybe some space insects were involved? All too weird and uncommercial for words, that totally non-mainstream stuff there.

Also, although Greenberg may have coined the term "abstract expressionism" I don't think he can take credit for the process of abstraction, which got going somewhere in the second half of the 19th Century? My memory is foggy too but I'm p sure the process started happening in western art around the time of colonialism and exposure of western artists to much older non-representational styles of art in non-western cultures.

I think of all (or most) music as abstract, or non-imitative, although I don't think it's necessarily a worse descriptor for 'weird' music than 'experimental', which ive always felt is misused unless youre talking about say aleatoric john cage stuff, or electroacoustic circuit-bending squawks and squeals, or max/msp generative music.

Fair enough Branwell although because you were looking at this after mentioning free jazz (and Pollock provides the cover for Coleman's Free Jazz)..

yh the language of artistic abstraction is definitely well under formation in the mid-nineteenth century, a clear trajectory of aestheticism as an increasing interest in formal qualities such that in the later years someone like walter pater can claim that the other arts should aspire to music's formal purity. then i think greenberg takes that so far that no one (including himself) quite knows how to do anything interesting with it any more

so in that respect i'm agreed that pretty much every term available to us carries too much baggage

What is being abstracted is not "representation" which is a visual arts thing mostly, but, like I said, the formal elements of music - melody, beat, tone, texture, timbre, rhythm, that kind of thing.

You guys seem able to describe the music you mean perfectly well by describing its qualities or aspects. It's like you just want the shorthand of a word like "experimental" but unfortunately that word already means something else.

(Still trying to think what I consider an "experimental" approach to be the opposite of. Perhaps the opposite of "formulaic" but that word has a pejorative connotation I don't agree with. Formulas offer excellent constraints to sharpen creativity!)

(xp interestingly [maybe it isn't actually interesting] schaeffer used the term 'abstract music' to mean the opposite of 'concrete music', i.e. music that instead of dealing with sound dealt with abstract principles, like functional harmony or the series)

that is p interesting imo

Feldman doesn't use that terminology as far as i know but drew the same dichotomy and was fiercely anti "abstraction" in that sense

yeah i like the feldman bit where he talks about how his music is like mondrian's paintings, but not in the usual understanding, rather that what from a distance appears as formal clarity is with closer inspection much more smeared, messy, and imprecise

oh good, other people bringing up the stuff I was thinking about re: abstract: Greenberg and the CIA-funded AbEx bro-down of the 50s, Schaeffer and concrete, etc.

I think a lot of what gets lumped in the experimental category could be considered "abstract" but a lot isn't. Going back to the abstract vs. representational analogy with visual art, there is representational art that isn't abstract but isn't "classically pleasing," and this also has a musical corollary

i haven't read this whole revive and i think this was addressed to some extent by branwell and others but my personal take is i feel like the problem with thinking of music in terms of "mainstream" and "experimental" is that these distinctions are 100% about a history of economics that sort of comes "after the fact" of creative work, at least for recorded music, maybe it was a little different before, idk. i mean people and the work they do are not uninfluenced by economic history but it would be a shame to only read that dimension into how someone's work changes or stays the same over time. also, as a metric, it tends to reinforce the hierarchies in separate camps because it takes as its baseline a measure of power, pitting the cultural capital of "experimental" against the market power of "mainstream". we are what we measure, so imagining different or more open-ended ways of making sense of creative work is important as a rejoinder to these kinds of hard and stupid schoolboy lines. i mean sorry for the gender shot but i believe boys who do this incessantly are imbalanced and need to open their hearts so the rest of us don't have to suffer so much.

wot?

oh it's the king of derps

fuck off derp-a-lerp

claim your rights as a man and only post in the men's rights thread from here on out.

Was that with or without fedora?

i don't care, take whatever you need

i agree with you to some extent, but there are formal styles/aesthetics of music that are liked by large numbers of people and there are those that aren't. And as most of us have noted (esp. Branwell) the specifics do change over time, but it isn't just an economic issue or a structural means of dissemination issue. Granted, there are countless musicians making music that stylistic resembles that which is liked by large numbers of people to no acclaim, and maybe it would be more useful to think in terms of a .... spectrum of popularity, but Pop is a style that overlaps with, but isn't the same as "what is popular"